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Chapter 3 the Grassroots Organizations and the Religious Right Chapter 3 The grassroots organizations and the religious right “Take your Sharia and go home, you terrorist lovers. Your hands are bloody! Your money is bloody! Get out! Terrorists! Terrorists! Terrorists!” These statements were shouted by protestors at Muslim American children walk- ing into a fundraiser event in Yorba Linda, California, in February of this year. The Muslim American families moved briskly into the building as some parents shielded their children from the men and women in the crowd, who were waving flags, carrying homemade signs, and barking obscenities. The taunts and howls of the mob were captured on video and later circulated online. The YouTube video left many observers around the country outraged at the visceral display of hatred toward a minority group.1 But it was just the latest in a string of events that have included vandalism at mosques, Koran burnings, and street protests against American Muslims. Our nation is witnessing a rising tide in anti-Muslim sentiments. A Washington Post -ABC News poll last September showed that nearly half of Americans (49 percent) hold an unfavorable view of Islam, which is a 10 percent increase from October 2002.2 Yet the Yorba Linda rally did not occur in a vacuum. Nor was it spontaneous. Some of the people involved are members of national organizations dedicated to targeting the Muslim American community. One of the largest such hate groups, ACT! for America, was involved in both the Yorba Linda incident and similar hate rallies in Tennessee, Florida, and other states, as this chapter of our report will demonstrate. This national movement builds on the success of their “Ground Zero mosque” hysteria over the planned Park51 community center in Manhattan— fueled in part by a team of paid organizers bent on stirring hatred. Indeed, as the previous chapters of this report detail, the steady increase in dem- onstrations and other forms of harassment toward American Muslims is part of a calculated strategy that is paid for by a small clutch of foundations that fund some select Islamophobia network think tanks that in turn provide a wide array of mis- The grassroots organizations and the religious right | www.americanprogress.org 63 characterized facts about the threat of Islam and Muslims in America. These think tanks in turn provide the incendiary rhetoric employed by ACT! for America and other grassroots groups promoting anti-Muslim hate. Now these groups—the muscle of the Islamophobia network—are enjoying a boost in fundraising, thanks to their scare-mongering, often with the seed funding provided by the think tanks featured in the previous chapter. And they are hiring experienced political operatives to exploit the fear and hatred they peddle in the run-up to the 2012 national elections. Notably, the anti-Muslim, anti-Islam grassroots network in America is increas- ingly successful because its members borrow tactics from the most innovative political movements of the last two decades. They use online strategies akin to those deployed by the progressive presidential campaigns of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama to recruit volunteers and keep them engaged. Some of these grassroots groups also hire talented evangelical organizers who built much of the conservative faith-based politi- cal movements that were prominent in the 1990s. And many of the groups tap into the growing force of the Tea Party as well as more established conservative political organizations. To understand the ability of the grassroots network to take messages to millions of Americans, this chapter will explore the leading groups responsible for developing grassroots organizations and anti-Muslim campaigns. These dedicated grassroots organizers have built lists and established local citizens groups they later rely on to turn out at rallies, make phone calls, testify on behalf of legislation, and donate money. In this section, we will look specifically at three types of anti-Muslim grassroots groups: • Single-minded Islamophobia groups, exemplified by ACT! for America, one of the largest grassroots group dedicated to targeting Muslims • Religious-right groups such as the American Family Association and the Eagle Forum, and anti-Muslim organizations such as Stop Islamization of America, which increasingly lead massive public information campaigns with myths and misinformation about Islam and Muslims • State-based, local, and Tea Party organizations, including the Tennessee Freedom Coalition, the North Orange County (California) Conservative Coalition, the Patriot Action Network, and the First Coast Tea Party in Florida 64 Center for American Progress | Hate, Inc. We turn first to ACT! for America, a grassroots organization with membership chapters across the country. ACT! for America: Single-minded, anti-Muslim focus A right-wing pundit with boundless ambition, Brigitte Gabriel, age 46, founded ACT! for America in 2007 as a citizen action network to “inform, educate, and mobilize Americans regarding the multiple threats of radical Islam.”3 ACT! for America was crafted with the intention to replicate the success of the National Rifle Association as a single-issue group that can drive legislation, political races, and the national discourse. But instead of pushing gun rights, Gabriel’s group hopes to make fear of Islam a pillar of the Republican Party and a galvanizing force in politics. ACT! for America’s world view is laid out in this statement from its website:4 The grassroots organizations and the religious right | www.americanprogress.org 65 Called a “radical Islamophobe” by The New York Times,5 Gabriel travels the coun- try giving talks about how she endured persecution in Lebanon as a Christian at the hands of radical Muslim terrorists.6 She says that Americans must unite to “defeat radical Islam,” and explains that any tolerance toward the religion will allow for the destruction of Western society.7 She is promoted as a valuable insider and expert on radical Islam due to her “first-hand account of her experiences in the opening salvos of Islamic Jihad towards the Western world in the Middle East.”8 Much of her rhetoric is riddled with crude bigotry. For instance, she routinely says that every “practicing Muslim who believes in the teaching of the Quran cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America.”9 The fight against “radical Islam” for Gabriel apparently includes all Arabs as well. At a 2004 Duke University counterterrorism speakout, she explained the differ- ence between Arabs (and Muslims) and Israelis: “It’s barbarism versus civilization. It’s democracy versus dictatorship. It’s goodness versus evil.”10 Gabriel informed the Christians United for Israel convention audience in 2007 that Arabs and Muslims “have no soul. They are dead set on killing and destruc- tion. And in the name of something they call ‘Allah’ which is very different from the God we believe.”11 Blending her personal story with anecdotes about the dangers of Islamic terror, Gabriel is a favorite of conservative conferences, Fox News, and Tea Party rallies. In this capacity, she validates the Islamophobia network’s manufactured fears and hate campaign directed against Muslims. And she validates and repeats the anti-Muslim memes promoted by Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, and Robert Spencer, such as “President Obama was born into the Islamic faith,”12 radical Muslims have “infiltrated” our government and “are being radicalized in radical mosques,”13 and that Muslims engage in taqiyya,14 which she describes as religiously mandated lying. She bases this last charge on the Center for Security Policy’s inaccurate definition of the Arabic word. The Anti-Defamation League reviewed Gabriel’s activities and concluded, “Gabriel’s views are in line with a growing field of groups that use community concerns about Islamic extremism to stoke fear toward the Muslim community at large.”15 Discussing Gabriel and the network she is a part of, Brian Fishman, a research fellow at both the New America Foundation and the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, said, “When you’ve got folks who are looking for the worst in Islam and are promoting that as the entire religion of 1.5 or 1.6 billion people, then you only empower the real extremists.”16 66 Center for American Progress | Hate, Inc. Her general theme—that Americans must wake up and confront the threat of Islam in every corner of society—is found throughout ACT!’s literature and training materials. The ACT! website, for example, features a 52-slide PowerPoint detailing the typical ACT! training seminar, which claims Muslims are seeking to “conquer America” and “spread Sharia.”17 But what makes Gabriel’s organization unique is the sophistication with which it has applied its organizing goals. The brain behind the anti-Muslim operation is former Christian Coalition strat- egist Guy Rodgers, who served as a consultant to the 2008 presidential cam- paign of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).18 During his tenure as national field director at Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition, Rodgers “planted and tended chapters across the country” and helped the organization become the Christian right’s “most potent political organization.”19 Rodgers, the national executive director of ACT!, runs an organization today that boasts 573 chapters and 170,000 members worldwide, according to Chris Slick, director of online The brain behind operations for ACT!20 ACT! for America ACT! pursues a multipronged strategy for building its activist base. The organi- zation hosts a series of meetings to bring interested activists together and train is former Christian them with best practices. Its most high-profile event is an annual conference to gather speakers from the anti-Muslim movement’s think tank core, among Coalition strategist them National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy and Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy.
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